Commentary on the interrelationships of the political, economic, and social spheres.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

A Few Collected Words

I continue to keep an ever-growing quote file, things that
spark a connection, helping to clarify the principles that lead to freedom,
prosperity, and civilization. Maybe, after the heavy writing of the last couple
of weeks, it’s a good day to share a few words from other minds.

Patriotism
is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady
dedication of a lifetime.—Adlai Stevenson

The
first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be
able and willing to pull his own weight.—Teddy Roosevelt

The work of citizenship is hard work that calls
upon us to use our best thinking,

our most careful study, our most rigorous
analysis.—Aristotle

Following
the law places a judge in a role that is in large part clerical, where he
labors largely as a functionary, applying and implementing the law. The judge’s
primary task is to find and follow the law.—BYU Law Professor Brett Sharp

Nothing you learn here at Oxford will be of the slightest possible
use to you later, save only this: if you work hard and intelligently, you
should be able to detect when a man is talking rot. And that is the main, if
not the sole, purpose of education.—Harold MacMillan, Prime Minister of Great
Britain, Chancellor of Oxford from 1960-1986, to an Oxford graduating class

This final, longer quote is from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the
beginning of “Men Have Forgotten God,” the Templeton Address, 1983:

More than
half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of
older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had
befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.

Since then I
have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in
the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal
testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the
effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked
today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous
Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put
it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this
has happened.

What is
more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the
end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the
rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance.
And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire
twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise
and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.